Thérèse Raquin: smell motif, Madame Bovary, the cat

1/ This is my first Zola. 

Thérèse Raquin, like Balzac’s Eugénie Grandet, begins with a detailed description of the surroundings. Place them side by side with the 20th century Japanese books I read last year (Soseki, Kawabata, Tanizaki, etc.)—it’s funny to see how detailed and specific the French are, and how vague and hazy the Japanese tend to be. 

2/ I picked up the novel knowing that it’s about a woman having an affair and plotting with the lover to kill the husband, but didn’t know about the marriage. I can’t be the only one grossed out by it: they are first cousins! They’ve grown up together since she’s 2! Ew. 

That’s my first wtf moment in the book.  

3/ The writing is good. 

“All these faces drove her crazy. […] And Thérèse could not see a single human, not a living creature, among these grotesque and sinister beings with whom she was shut up. At times she would suffer hallucinations, thinking that she was buried in a vault together with mechanical bodies whose heads moved and whose arms and legs waved when their strings were pulled. The heavy atmosphere of the dining room stifled her, and the eerie silence and yellowish glow of the lamp filled her with a vague sense of terror, an inexpressible feeling of anxiety.” (Ch.4)  

I like that. 

Thérèse is not Emma Bovary, but these lines make me think of Emma’s ennui. I’m reading the Penguin edition, translated by Robin Buss, which includes Zola’s preface for the 2nd edition. His goal is to study temperament, not character, and he says: 

“Thérèse and Laurent are human animals, nothing more.” (Preface)

What animal is Thérèse? A cat, I assume.

“This convalescent life that was imposed on her drove her back into herself. She became accustomed to speaking in a low voice, walking along quietly, and staying silent and motionless on a chair, looking blankly with wide-open eyes. Yet, when she did raise an arm or take a step, there was a feline suppleness in her, a mass of energy and passion dormant within her torpid frame.” (Ch.2) 

The comparison is repeated later: 

“He was no longer his own master; his mistress, with her feline sinuosity and nervous flexibility, had gradually insinuated herself into every fibre of his body. He needed that woman to live as one needs to eat and drink.” (Ch.9) 

There is a tabby cat in the novel that she often plays with, called Francois.

4/ Here is Laurent, the lover: 

“Laurent amazed her: he was tall, strong and fresh-faced. She looked with a kind of awe at his low forehead with its rough black hair, at his plump cheeks, his red lips and his regular features with their sanguine beauty. Her gaze paused for a moment on his neck, a broad, short neck, thick and powerful. […] Laurent came of true peasant stock, with a somewhat heavy manner, rounded back, slow, studied movements and a calm, stubborn look about him.” (Ch.5) 

Excuse me for being shallow but that doesn’t sound hot, though I can see that his qualities contrast with the illness and languor of the husband (Camille). 

The stories of Laurent’s studies makes me think of K in Kokoro—did Soseki ever read Zola? I wonder.  

5/ The characters, Zola says, are no more than human animals. Here’s something I’ve noticed: smells.  

This is Thérèse as perceived by Laurent, when he goes into the bedroom for their rendezvous: 

“She exuded a warm smell, a smell of white linen and freshly washed flesh.” (Ch.7) 

The first time Thérèse meets Laurent:

“The young man’s sanguine nature, his resonant voice, his hearty laughter and the sharp, strong smells that he emitted disturbed the young woman and plunged her into a kind of nervous anxiety.” (Ch.5)  

Contrast that with the smell from Camille when he was a kid, according to Thérèse: 

“‘…I was brought up in the damp warmth of a sickroom. I used to sleep beside Camille; in the night, I would move away from him, disgusted by the musty smell of his body.’” (Ch.7)  

He’s still the same now. 

“‘… And I found a husband who was no different from the ailing little boy I used to sleep with when I was six. He was just as frail, as whining, and he still had that smell of a sick child that used to disgust me so much in the old days.’” (ibid.) 

Now look again at the passage about Laurent. Their affair is purely physical. 

See this passage in Madame Bovary, about Emma and Rodolphe at the agricultural show: 

“His arms were folded across his knees, and thus lifting his face towards Emma, close by her, he looked fixedly at her. She noticed in his eyes small golden lines radiating from black pupils; she even smelt the perfume of the pomade that made his hair glossy.

Then a faintness came over her; she recalled the Viscount who had waltzed with her at Vaubyessard, and his beard exhaled like this air an odour of vanilla and citron, and mechanically she half-closed her eyes the better to breathe it in. […] yet all the time she was conscious of the scent of Rodolphe’s head by her side. This sweetness of sensation pierced through her old desires, and these, like grains of sand under a gust of wind, eddied to and fro in the subtle breath of the perfume which suffused her soul. She opened wide her nostrils several times to drink in the freshness of the ivy round the capitals...” (Ch.8) 

The translation is by Eleanor Marx-Aveling. 

This is also about smells and their affair is also physical (though Emma likes to think herself a romantic), but the smell Flaubert writes about is the perfume of the pomade, whereas Zola seems to be writing about Laurent’s natural odour. 

Compared to Emma Bovary, Thérèse seems to be, how do I say it, less cultured and more animalistic. If Emma is morally corrupted by reading, Thérèse never reads. Zola’s book seems to be in conversation with Flaubert’s. Thérèse and Emma have a few similarities. Both of them hate their husbands. Both of them hate their lives, their surroundings. Both of them haven’t had good sex till the affairs. Laurent’s thoughts, as he wonders whether to pursue Thérèse, remind me of Rodolphe’s. 

However Thérèse makes Emma Bovary appear so much better: Emma at least has the decency to go out of the house to cheat on her husband, among other things. 

6/ While the humans are like brutes, the cat is like a human. In this scene, Thérèse is with her lover in the bedroom of her and her husband, and the cat is watching. 

“The tabby cat, François, was sitting on his bottom right in the middle of the room. Solemn and motionless, he was looking at the two lovers with wide-open eyes. He seemed to be examining them carefully, without blinking, lost in a sort of diabolical trance.” (Ch.7) 

Does Tolstoy ever write about cats? I remember him writing about dogs and horses but can’t remember any cats.  

Thérèse jokes about the cat watching everything and talking to Camille.

“Laurent looked at the cat’s large green eyes and felt a shudder run through him.” (ibid.) 

Then he picks him up and puts him outside the room. What a great scene. 

7/ Zola writes about smells again, when Laurent’s contemplating murder. 

“He felt suffocated in this narrow cage, which Thérèse had left full of the heat of her passion. He seemed to be still breathing something of her, she had been there, leaving behind a pervasive scent of herself, a smell of violets; but now all he had to press in his arms was his mistress’s intangible ghost, present all around him; he was in a fever of reviving, unsatisfied desire.” (Ch.9) 

The animal in him now takes over. In him now there’s no conscience, no morality, no sense. 

“Driven by insomnia, aroused by the pungent scents that Thérèse had left behind, he devised traps, working out what could go wrong and enumerating all the benefits to be derived from becoming a murderer.” (ibid.) 

He’s driven by the physical, by the smell.

“He grasped the material between his dry lips and drank in the faint scents still clinging to it; and he stayed there, breathless, panting, watching strips of fire cross his closed eyelids.” (ibid.) 

Later, in Saint-Ouen: 

“The bitter scent of the earth mingled with the light perfume of Thérèse and seeped into him, heating his blood and arousing his lust.” (Ch.11) 

I expect that smells will still be significant in the later part of the novel.